Bireswar and the Keteki seedbank

The notebook is bound with a rubber band that was never meant to last forty years. Its pages are foxed, its hand is small, and on the inside cover, in faded ink, are five words in Assamese: the year the rains failed.

The hand is Bireswar Hazarika's grandfather's. The year was 1983. The rains failed across most of upper Assam, and the aush crop — the early monsoon rice that most paddy households here depend on — did not stand. What did stand, in the four acres of low-lying paddy outside the village of Hatiborhola, was a small reserved patch of Keteki Joha, the aromatic short-grain that the family had always kept for weddings and Bihu.

Joha is not a high-yielder. It is fussy about water, slow to mature, and easily lodged in a strong wind. But it is also, the grandfather noted in the small precise hand, the rice that did not die.

He wrote down the dates of sowing, the depths of standing water in his paddy that summer, the day-on-day temperatures from the only thermometer in the village, and most usefully of all, the exact location in the four acres where each Keteki strain had been sown. Forty-three years later, his grandson Bireswar still uses the notebook to decide where to sow.

When we first met Bireswar in 2024, we were looking for a Keteki Joha supplier who had not crossed his strain with the higher-yielding modern Joha varieties that the state seed corporation had been pushing for two decades. The high-yielders look identical to the eye. They taste similar in the pot. But they are not, by the definition that the Geographical Indication uses, the same rice. The GI for Keteki Joha — granted in 2018 — protects a specific landrace, with specific morphological markers, grown in a specific belt of Assam. Cross it with a modern variety and you have something perfectly edible that is no longer Keteki.

Bireswar's grandfather had, without ever using the word, maintained a seedbank. Every harvest, the best panicles from each row were dried, hand-threshed, and stored in clay pots sealed with cow-dung paste — one pot for the bao (deep-water) strain, one for the sali (winter) strain, one for the prized aromatic Keteki. The pots were passed to Bireswar's father in 1996, and to Bireswar in 2013.

When the Karbi Anglong belt began commercial Joha cultivation in the late 2000s, almost every cooperative in the region accepted seed from the state corporation. It was free. It was reliable. It promised higher yield. By 2019, most of the “Keteki Joha” sold from the region was, genetically, a hybrid. Bireswar's four acres were one of the few that had not crossed.

The economics, of course, are punishing. Bireswar yields about 2.4 tonnes per acre — roughly forty percent less than his neighbours who grow the hybrid. He compensates because we pay him a premium that reflects what the GI is actually worth: not the average mandi rate for “fine-grain rice”, but the price the GI tag earns on a premium retailer's shelf. Roughly four times the standard procurement price, paid weekly, direct to his account.

The first time we explained the pricing to him, he listened without interrupting, which is his way. Then he said: “My grandfather's notebook will fetch this price?” We said yes. He said, “Then I think we will keep the notebook in a better place.”

The seedbank is not a romantic object. It is, in the most literal sense, the only reason the Keteki Joha that ships out of Kopahi's Jorhat facility is genuinely the GI rice and not its higher-yielding cousin. Without the four acres in Hatiborhola, the protected landrace would, in this generation, simply have crossed itself out of existence.

Bireswar is sixty-three. His son is studying agricultural engineering at Tezpur University. We have had two conversations with the son. He is interested. He is not yet committed. The notebook, in either case, will sit on the same shelf in the same house for at least the next planting season.

We are not, in our company, in the business of guaranteeing futures. We can only guarantee buying terms, prices, and the truth of the labels we put on the bags. The rest is what Bireswar and his son will decide.

But the year his grandfather wrote down — the year the rains failed — was the year a small four-acre patch in Karbi Anglong, almost by accident, became one of the most quietly important agricultural archives in Northeast India. Forty-three years on, the GI tag has finally caught up with what the notebook always knew.

— Ashreeta Gogoi writes from the field desk at Kopahi. She visits Karbi Anglong twice a year.